Speaker Biography
Mme Gandhi aka Kiran joined Oprah on tour, has toured with M.I.A. as drummer, was invited to be a TED Fellow, and is actively engaged with her supporters on social media, finding new ways to share her music and messages in the virtual world.
Today Madame Gandhi travels to speak, DJ and perform internationally. Gandhi’s mission is to use her music and voice as a medium for a message about personal expression, sustainability and thriving.
In 2025 she released her latest work, Let Me Be Water. It’s a musical meditation that invites listeners into a journey of emotional fluidity, inner healing, and self-connection. The album’s creation is rooted in the idea that, like water, we are constantly in motion—adapting, shifting, and flowing through life’s challenges and triumphs. Every track is a musical mantra exploring themes of surrender, acceptance, and growth. Created alongside We Make Noise, a music education non-profit that supports women and gender expansive producers.
Let Me Be Water is a meditation on the importance of resilience, compassion, and the courage to recognize that being soft and open-hearted requires great strength.
‘Let’s create a world that is linked, not ranked. Listen to and contribute to our planet, with respect and motivated by love.’
In 2022, she traveled to Antarctica while pursuing her Masters in Music, Science and Technology at Stanford University’s CCRMA to record the sounds of glaciers melting to create awareness and empathy around climate change. These sounds are now featured in her latest song “In Purpose” available on all streaming platforms, where for the first time ever, NATURE is credited as an artist to receive a portion of all streaming royalties. This is part of Earth Percent’s Sounds Right initiative.
In June 2023, she was awarded the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame Abe Olman Prize for excellence in songwriting and leadership. She also won the Jury Award at SXSW for her music video, “Waiting For Me”.
Kiran also holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics, Political Science and Women’s Studies from Georgetown (COL ’11) and an MBA from Harvard Business School (2015), and has used her degrees to run her own musical project as well as advise music companies Spotify, Stem, Bonnaroo and D’addario. Between 2011-2013, Kiran worked at Interscope Records for two years as their first ever digital analyst, studying patterns in Spotify and YouTube consumption behavior.
In 2015, she ran the London Marathon free-bleeding to combat period stigma around the world, sparking a global viral conversation about how we treat menstruation in various cultures. She now travels often to perform and speak about modern gender equality celebrating the female voice.
Kiran grew up between New York City and Bombay, India, playing drums and attending The Chapin School. She graduated from Georgetown University in 2011 with a double major in mathematics and political science and a minor in women’s studies.
Upon graduation, she landed a job in Los Angeles as Interscope Records’s first-ever digital analyst. Combining her passion for mathematics and music, her job was to understand music consumption patterns on Spotify and YouTube, predict sales trends based on these new volume metrics and create an internal system for how the label could understand the success of an artist online.
In 2013, Kiran linked up with Grammy-nominated artist M.I.A. and began touring internationally with her as her drummer all across North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. That same year, Kiran was also accepted to Harvard Business School’s M.B.A. program, and so when she began school in the fall in Boston, was still touring simultaneously with M.I.A. Kiran’s TEDx talk on “Atomic Living” embodies her belief that by knowing and protecting the things that matter to you most, life’s toughest choices become easier to navigate.
As an activist, Kiran uses her voice, music and written work to empower her audiences to be their best and authentic selves. She believes wholeheartedly in the idea that we must strive to live in a world that is “linked and not ranked”, in which each person has something unique to contribute to one another, and therefore we must equip each person with the environment they need to access their fullest potential. Kiran has partnered with various menstrual health organizations to improve women’s access to affordable and safe menstrual care. She speaks often about how menstruation taboo affects women and girls daily around the world, and was part of the early round table discussions that lead to the elimination of the “luxury tax” on tampons in her home city of New York.
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